ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to bring together two strands from recent work which cast the peripherality problem in a new light. On the one hand there have been advances in the definition of accessibility which take a more disaggregated approach, concentrating on accessibility within regions and to networks. On the other hand models in the “New Economic Geography” tradition concentrate on the interplay between production characteristics, imperfectly competitive markets and transport costs to demonstrate the potential ambiguity of convergent and divergent forces in the economic integration process. To this we aim to add a third strand, which is typically absent from both approaches, a more detailed consideration of the transport sector itself. Accessibility measures concentrate on objective measures of impedance, distance, time and cost, but do not usually allow explicitly for the role of market structure in the transport sector. Similarly, New Economic Geography models rely too heavily on the simple representation of transport costs as an “iceberg” formulation. This makes for a more tractable model, but misses one of the key dimensions which is of particular relevance to peripheral regions.
